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BBC’s response to Sara Cox complaint

Well, the BBC have got back to me fairly quickly, an email arrived in my inbox at 5.30 this morning, full of, well… it made the right noises “we fully appreciate your disappointment”, but I couldn’t help but notice striking similarities to the response sent to PeskyPeople yesterday. Judge for yourself:

Dear Ms Williams,

Reference CAS-885218-413GXD

Thanks for contacting us.

I understand that you were unhappy with comments made on twitter by Sara Cox regarding subtitled films as you found them to be offensive.

We can’t comment on Sara Cox’s messages on her own personal twitter account.

The off-air (non-BBC) activities of our presenters should not undermine the public’s perception of the impartiality, integrity and objectivity of the BBC. We have strict guidelines which state the BBC’s policy in this area and include advice on maintaining impartiality; declaring conflicts of interest; acceptability of outside commitments; political activities; commercial, business and financial interests; personal benefits and commercial advertising.

I do however fully appreciate your disappointment with the comments therefore please be assured that I’ve registered your complaint in our audience log. This is a daily report of audience feedback that’s made available to many BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive Board, channel controllers and other senior managers.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

The letters may be signed by different people, but I’m not fooled. There is a positive spin on this though, and I hope it’s true; the BBC have been deluged by so many complaints about Sara Cox’s behaviour that they’ve been forced to come up with a standard response in order to cope with the sheer volume of outrage. This would also explain the gap between PeskyPeople’s response and mine – the time it took to wade through the complaints to get to mine. I really, really hope that’s true, so the next time a jumped-up BBC ‘personality’ thinks it’s a good idea to bash access for others, and then insult those others when they object, they might think twice.